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About FreeBSD Ports

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The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for
users and administrators to install applications. There are currently
29841 ports available.

The Ports Collection supports the latest release on the
FreeBSD-CURRENT and
FreeBSD-STABLE branches. Older releases are not
supported and may or may not work correctly with an up-to-date ports
collection. Over time, changes to the ports collection may rely on
features that are not present in older releases. Wherever convenient,
we try not to gratuitously break support for recent releases, but it
is sometimes unavoidable. When this occurs, patches contributed by
the user community to maintain support for older releases will usually
be committed.

Each port listed here
contains any patches necessary to make the original application source
code compile and run on FreeBSD. Installing an application is as
simple as typing
make
install
in the port directory. If you
download the framework for the entire list of ports by installing the
ports hierarchy, you can have
thousands of applications right at your fingertips.

Each port's Makefile automatically fetches the
application source code, either from a local disk, CD-ROM or via
ftp,
unpacks it on your system, applies the patches, and compiles. If
all went well, a simple make install will install the
application and register it with the package system.

For most ports, a precompiled package also exists, saving
the user the work and time of having to compile anything at all. Use
pkg
install to securely download and install the precompiled
version of a port. For more information see Using
pkg for Binary Package Management